#186 Adam Spector — Disrupt Yourself Before Your Boss Does It for You

You need to disrupt yourself before your competitor does. So in my EA's case, she should have disrupted her own work. I told her what the roadmap was going to be before I ever disrupted it for her. The moment I disrupted it for her, that's now off her plate and it's not going to come back because I've now built, I've disrupted her. And so what she needs to do, and this, I'm using this really as an analogy for all the employees who are listening, you need to disrupt yourself before I ever do it. Because once I do it, I will realize I don't need to have you. And the people who disrupt themselves, though, will be the ones who stick around long term because they now own a key product that I didn't build. It's great to be here. Yeah. So I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Chore. We literally do the back office chores. So HR, finance, compliance, equity, all the annoying things that no founder should spend any time ever doing. I'm also, I'm a 4-time founder overall. I've had the privilege of investing in over 200 companies. I'm also the host of the Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast. So I think deeply about how do we build the best company I can build and how others can build the best companies they can build is really my day-to-day focus.

Man, that's a lot of, you must be very busy. So like respect, that's an impressive body of work. The, what I've like Preparing for this interview, I really wanted to touch base on a principle that I learned from another guest I interviewed. Unfortunately, their name is not coming to mind right now. I've never been very good at names, but the maxim rang true. So I'm just going to say it out loud and I just want to hear your reaction to it. That taste comes from experiencing operational pain. What would— what's your reaction to that statement?

I think that's accurate, but in some ways you would say it's the same thing for everything, right? Taste comes from just experience in general. I'm thinking about my kids. There's a lot of foods they don't like, but I essentially convince them to try all the food that we have at dinner, and they usually dislike it, but they need to try it. There's— I think I forgot what the number is. Your kids need to try something like 10 times before they end up liking it or getting used to it. I think it's the same thing in every part of the business world. You don't know if something's good or bad until you've had a bunch of experiences to get there.

Yeah. Daniel Ek says that taste is just judgment plus curiosity, and you have to exercise curiosity to improve your judgment. And then—

But a lot of people aren't curious. That's, I think, one of the key things. A lot of people are not curious, and that's problematic.

Yeah. And I think going into what Chor is, which is offloading, I think the obvious, like repeatable, regulated, non-differentiating operational aspects of a business and delegating it to your team. What, like when you're in like sales calls and you're trying to convince people to hire your company, like what do you—

Hirechor.com, I guess. Hire us.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hirechor. What are like the biggest I guess like objective objections maybe from people, and specifically if I have like segment, like the stories that you probably have of people being like, oh, I could just do this myself, or I could just do this with AI. To me, that, do you experience that as like an objection when?

Yeah, we look, we, I experience that all the time. Um, and what I tell people is, I look, I think I try to be nice about it, but I think it's utterly insane when people say that. I try to say that with a smile, but I think it's utterly insane. It's the same thing as literally everything that you're— that's in your house right now, all the tools you're using. It's the same thing as you saying, I'm going to go rebuild my recording, my digital recording studio that we're using for this podcast. I'm going to go rebuild my cell phone. I'm going to go rebuild my computer all on my own because I can. No, that's insane. You'd be like, of course, why would you ever do that? You're of course not going to go do that. The thing is, here's the magic of the capitalist society that we live in. Is that there are companies who compete day in and day out to specialize at building the best possible product they possibly can, and they're really good at that. So why would you recreate what they're doing? Because your recreation— if I try to go build my own cell phone today, my version would be 10x worse and probably 10 times more expensive than the iPhone that I have, right? Because it's— I could do it, I probably could go do it, but man, it would be hard and expensive to do. So instead, I'd outsource that work to Apple. And it's the same thing with every part of a business. The only thing that founders should spend any time focusing on is the one unique thing that they are actually selling to their customers that customers want to buy. No customer is going to go purchase your product because you as the CEO are wasting your time doing HR, finance, compliance type work. That is not why a customer buys your product. Ever. So why would you put time into it the same way? Why would you put time into building your own phone? It's crazy.

Whenever I see a reaction like that, passionate reaction, it is like, uh, usually that comes from experience, right? Like the level of passion.

I've had too much and I've had lots of rejection. I've had a lot.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's different. People don't know that it exists. And some people, yeah, I know now that I know you exist, this is the best thing ever. I'm going to use this right now. And they're like, well, like I can keep doing this work myself. And I'm like, you can, and your company will probably fail because of that.

Yeah, 'cause your attention's split. I'm curious, like maybe what's the origin story of Chor? Because when I'm like looking at your reaction and your experience, going back to the whole like taste is just judgment plus curiosity, is you, you, this isn't your first company. You probably have scar tissue. From making that mistake in a past company, right? Like you probably tried to do it yourself and—

Yeah, of course. That's literally why Chorus started. That is why Chorus started was because I experienced this pain myself. I was like, this is— so I happen to be more on the business side than the technical side, although I'm decently-ish technical enough. I was actually a product manager at Twitter for a while, things like that. But I experienced this pain myself. So I have a co-founder who's technical and then everything else but building the product, He went building the product. I worked on ideas, product ideas and stuff, but he actually built the core product. And this happened in every one of my companies. And then I'm tasked with saying, go run the business, figure out payroll, figure out all the complexity of compliance, make sure our taxes get paid, all these things. And I was like, or I could spend my time making sure our go-to-market is flawless, making sure we're getting more customers, having more customer calls every day, those sorts of things. And to me, in the end, this was an obvious trade-off, right? I can't do 2 things at once. So if I'm spending time fixing payroll and I'm not spending that time building my product or getting new customers, I'm probably losing customers or not having one or having one less feature that in a competitive world I need to have that feature out so I can get that next customer. To me, that's an easy trade-off. But a lot of— and we should talk about this— like a lot of founders are pennywise and pound foolish. Yeah. And so they see the dollar savings they get by doing it themselves and don't recognize that they can be better. And actually, maybe I'll keep going a little bit, but the other thing I'll add there is people being pennywise and pound foolish. People think, I'm going to have a cheap computer because again, a computer is a computer. It does its work. I don't really need something that fast. The flip side is for an extra few hundred dollars, you can get the fastest, newest computer that's out there. And the seconds that you save by it loading faster, by you being able to have more tabs open to do your job, whatever it is, actually leads to a higher ROI for you. And that's hard to think about because people, we all are used to saving a few pennies here and there, which is a good mindset, but you're missing out on the harder part, which is investing in yourself and the time that you need to go do the thing that you are special at.

I love that. I have 2 stories from my personal experience that I like to think that I've, I'm pretty curious. I don't know if my judgment is always the best, but it's, I like the first story is I was trying to be, I was penny-wise and pound-foolish on an attempted side hustle consulting business, but I looked at the accounting software that I was getting from this accounting firm. I was spending a lot of money to basically do most of the admin work usually, which shows that there's a lot more moving parts to finance than I thought. But I'm like, oh, I could recreate this software. And this is before AI. I just was able to use different tools to stitch 'em together to recreate the software. And I'm like, I don't need accountants. I could just use this and TaxAct. And I ended up spending most of my time doing bookkeeping and it was distracting from sales, right? Because there, it's a ton of work to keep all this stuff collated. And I'm sure AI can help with that, but still, do you want to maintain an AI system? You want, do you want as a non-finance person, do make a reconciliation agent that you have? It's the taste of being able to review reconciliation. That's the first story. And that was my experience of no, if you should, the fact that it distracted me from sales is the reason that business failed. And the, I think the second story is what everyone's thinking right now. Like everyone could push code. Oh yeah, we, everybody could push code. Everyone could. submit PRs. In a past job that I had a while, like a while back, I like, it, I was like, oh, I'd like to actually start prototyping in code now that it is around Sonnet 3.5. I get the test environment set up and within an hour of getting access to it, it was okay because these test environments turn off within the day. They're meant to be like fungible, but I made one broad scoped query and it turned all of them off for everyone else. 'Cause I didn't have that experience of using a shared resource.

Yep.

With my team. And it was okay. The engineers were like, oh, we're glad you learned something. But I didn't, I immediately learned, oh no, I don't. AI did not add any DevOps experience or taste. I'm going to just let my engineers worry about that and I'll just use it for what My job is to prototype and to test out ideas with customers, but not actually go to production. That's such a low value thing.

Yeah. And look, this is the difference with the world today. So, you know, you probably heard, of course, like the SaaSpocalypse when all these SaaS companies got killed, their stock price got killed because they think, oh, AI is going to replace them all. And I think that narrative, maybe their valuations are too high, but their narrative is generally wrong because in the end, like, just because I can build anything does not mean that I should, right? So you're drinking Mountain Dew right now. You could go make yourself Mountain Dew, but for the relatively cost, like the company that, I don't know, Coke owns them or Pepsi or whatever, but like the cost for you to go buy that at the store and have the same quality every single time is so much higher than you making your own, you're not going to go do it. So to use a SaaS example, right? I'm not going to go, I could rebuild a CRM. I can make my own CRM today with AI, but man, I got a whole company to focus on where I'm trying to get the world's best back office solution. And so like, I shouldn't be spending any of my time building a CRM and then maintaining a CRM because for $100 a month per seat, I can have a company that specializes in that do it. And they're keep— they're continuously building new updates and new features and things they're pushing out. That I don't have time to think about. I don't need, and, or, well, there's parts I don't need, but I'd rather have a specialist who's good at what they do, what they do, as long as the price is right, than try to recreate that myself. And this is where, once again, the reason our society has been so successful is because of specialization. Because I can hire someone to go build my Mountain Dew, can hire someone to go make my computer. And they do that at scale and they do it really well in ways that I would never be able to get good enough at. And it's the same thing for every product out there. And what goes back to the same point about chore, you could go do your back office work and your point about doing your own books, you could go do your own books, but the price is so freaking low to outsource it and your time is so precious. You should spend that time building, doing what you do great. That's it.

Yeah. And you can only— and most people, when it comes to the judgment-taste ratio, they're all judgment, no taste. The beautiful thing about capitalism is that they get filtered out of the system because they can't compete. And so all the— when I really started like unlocking like this podcast, for example, like when I stopped trying to save money and I started actually like spending more money to improve production and speed up operational bottlenecks in post-production. I was able to increase my inventory of episodes and like interviews I could handle. Like, you're lucky. Like, you would've had to wait 6 months or longer for your episode to come out. Like, now it's gonna come out in like probably a couple months after we're done recording this. It's like you can't save your way to more Abundance. You have to like, you have to increase your productivity through infrastructure capabilities.

Yeah, but I would actually put it differently. I totally agree. You can't save your way to the future. Like you need to invest in things. So I don't care if that's an investment in yourself, like maybe using that as an example. You can't save your way to better health, right? You actually have to go on a walk and work out, right? You can't do that without actually putting in the hard work. And it's the same thing in every bit of anyone's lives. You can't have a good relationship with your significant other unless you put work into it. It's all those things. So, but you have to invest. It doesn't just happen overnight. So if you want to build the world's best podcast, man, you got to do a lot of reps. Yes, you have to keep— you have to spend some money to hire great people who are already specialists at doing that, figure out what that looks like and get good at it. And you can't be pennywise and pound foolish. Now, there's always a trade-off, right? You're not going to maybe go for the producer that's $100,000 a month. To do it. You might say, I'm going to spend on a producer that's $1,000 a month, but that producer is still better than you doing it yourself. And then as your podcast gets better and you keep improving, maybe you upgrade to the next level and next level. But the only way entrepreneurs become successful is by investing in the future. It's not by saving.

And it's by, it's by having like equity in something that's valuable. Or, and yeah, like—

Another, maybe another way to put it too, just even a financial one, is if you are saving your money because you're frugal, great, save your cash, but you just put it in a bank account versus buying a stock, you're not really investing. You're saving your money, but your money will not grow very fast.

Yeah.

Where I can put it in the S&P 500 and make about 10% a year compounding growth versus essentially 0% in a bank account. Where I'm actually losing money because of inflation. That's an investment. So I made an investment. I took my money. I'm making my money work for me. And it's the same thing when I invest in spending it on making my podcast better or making my team better. Those are things you have to spend money on to get an outcome. Just so I— yeah, just don't be pennywise and pound foolish. And that's easier said than done, but it is critical if you plan on building a successful business or successful product.

Yeah. And like having, I'm trying to figure out like, what's like the best reframe here? Because it's, yeah, it makes sense to me, but like, I'm also very stubborn. So having like this obvious intuition for myself was a lot of pain and like mistakes of not living up to like the principles. The other day I was thinking about, oh, why, like how does like home prices go up in an area? And why are like some neighborhoods, like the houses more valuable even though like maybe they're older and crappier houses? And it clicked for me and maybe it's because I'm just getting like approaching middle age is, oh, now I see why as people get older, they get more involved in the communities and civic policy and stuff like that because they're investing in the community to make it safer, to have better parks, to like actually make it a place that's like people want to live. And then if more people want to live there, the housing prices go up and they make the community more valuable. I'm thinking about like that. I'm really going through the Hyundai founder's biography right now. And that guy built Korea, like he invested in Korea. And if you're reading it, it's like he never aimed to be rich. He wanted to make, he wanted to build Korea out of being a developing country. And like, that's his whole career is like building up industry, like shipbuilding infrastructure. And how like Seoul, Korea, like housing exploded and he invested in the communities to increase housing. And yeah, go ahead.

And this is a point generally, I think almost everything in life, you have to all work together to build something together and it's easy to have that break down, right? So arguably part of what the American miracle, in a sense, what makes America great is that we have this melting pot of people that generally believe in this big idea and want to make it better for everyone. And that has strengthened us as a nation overall. But it's also easy to break down if you stop investing in it or you start pulling people apart. You end up in a world where you're not getting great outcomes and you can't— right? You don't have those things that you want. So for a company, everyone needs to be bought into the idea of what you're trying to do. Take on that mindset and say, I want to go make this better every day. I don't need to go ask my boss every day to check. I want to go do this overall. And this is where you can build something great because you believe in a bigger idea beyond just yourself. Or using a big example from SpaceX or something, right? Like Elon Musk, once again, forget his politics, but man, that's a big idea, like going to Mars or going to the moon. And yeah, it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of iterations to get there, but Elon doesn't have to sit over everyone's shoulder to get them to do that job because most of them are excited by this big vision and idea of what they want to go do. And they will do it for the good of the company overall, or the good of Korea in the example that you gave.

That's a really good example because I don't know if you read that, that article about SpaceX that I think—

Which one? I read a lot of articles about them.

Yeah, there was a recent one about the— it was like this big prototype, like book foreword that I'll add it to the link in the show notes and I'll send it to you after the recording. But this guy, he's doing a an actual book about SpaceX culture. And like the whole premise was like all of the technology that they have is publicly available. Everyone knows their tactics, but no one has been able to replicate their results. And the whole premise was it really just came down to like culture and like people.

Yep.

That they are, they believe in something, a direction, like they believe in something enough to suffer for it because they believe in like the vision and Most people, when they are don't like when you don't have a vision, you are not willing to go struggle through all the the required iterations to make something successful. And that's like the exact like actually there's almost exact wording to what you said about like the SpaceX folks with the people of Korea. Like they were very known for like these external like consultants would come in and they'd see these Hyundai workers just like. Getting up at five, like working their faces off, like doing all this work. And the Hyundai founder said it's because they believe in Korea. Like they're trying to build their country at the same time. And so, like to them, it's like they're building their nation. Like they're not. Like you don't have a nation without people, right? And that's like they have this like vision of hey, this is worth the struggle because I believe in this thing. And I think whenever you quit something, it's because you just, I don't believe in this direction. And that's fine. Maybe that's a good system feedback from your body telling you like, hey, maybe you're not going to be a good competitor here. Be self-aware. But if you really think you want to be a great product builder, like technologist, this isn't like a normal job family where you could just, especially with AI, where you could just check boxes and get a salary. You have to be obsessed with what you're working on.

Exactly. And this is where I actually find it. I read an article this morning about how some major industrial plant in Connecticut is shutting down the last factory in this town that used to be filled with their factories from this company. And they're shutting it down because they're moving it overseas because it's cheaper and easier to do the work there with better technology. And I think where a lot of people miss the fact here is there's no reason why you can't manufacture great things in America, but you need to have people with the right attitude and mindset to go do it. There is no expectation just because you're an American, you are owed a job or your company owes you anything. You need to constantly be saying, how do we reinvent ourselves? If we keep doing things the same way we were doing it every single day, we will lose. And so for my own company, for Chor, we talk about this all the time, and I think it scares people and I don't quite know why. I said, look, AI is coming. We need to adopt it in all the things that we do and how we do our work. And I'm going to do my best to give you all the tools to do that and ideas for how to go do that. If you still refuse to adopt those things, it might— this might not be the right place for you. Now, to be clear, I don't think there is a right place for them if they're unable to adopt it here. I don't know where else they can get a job that doesn't require them to use AI. But like, the simple fact is like, you need to be open-minded in today's world. You need to be, to your point, you need to be curious, open-minded, be trying new things regularly to keep improving and pushing the ball forward. If you want to keep doing work the same way you were doing it a year ago or 2 years ago or 3 years ago, You will fail. That is not a path to success. And this is what so many employees, I think, miss, and even many founders, but many employees really miss that mindset is like they're expecting their boss or manager or CEO to solve it for them. No, you need to— hopefully you're bought into the vision of what's happening, but you also need to be in control of your career and take that bull by the horns and direct it the direction you want to go.

It's crazy. Like people are getting paid like close to $200K a year that say, oh, that's not my job. Or that's leadership, that's above my pay grade. And it's no, you're, that's why they hired you. That's what the money's for. You, what do you mean it's not your job? I'm hearing this from like product managers who like, it's their, they're saying that it's not their job to understand how like their product works. It's, it's wild.

Like, so I would literally tell those product managers, I'd be like, this is why you won't have a job in a year. Seriously. Like, That is, that is, if that is the mindset that you have, why would anyone ever promote you? Why do you think you're owed some promotion because you're able to sit in a seat and do some work? No, you need to understand the nuances. If you want to be a leader and get to the next level and protect your job, come up with new ideas, ask questions like, I don't understand this. Can you help explain? Hey, manager or boss, can you help explain the strategy behind this decision? The more curious you are, the more questions you ask, The better you will do and the more the company will say, this person's critical for our business. I want them in more positions and more seats to help us do new things. That's— that is the only type of employee that will be successful in this world of AI are the ones who are curious because no one has time to direct you to do this anymore. All the answers are just there if you ask. And with AI, there's no more excuses. And so if you want to sit back and have your manager tell you what to do, I'll show you someone who's going to be unemployed soon.

Yeah, because if I have to tell you what to do to get a memo written, AI doesn't question me. AI doesn't procrastinate. And it's just a memo. Like, I'm just trying to communicate an idea. Like, I don't care if it's like perfect or in my voice, but you can't—

Even if you want it in your voice, you can train AI.

Yeah, it's not that hard.

Like, this is the thing once again, like the answers are all there now. Like there's, we literally with Google, even before AI, we had the world's knowledge in our pockets. Now we have the world's PhDs in our pockets. So I have the best product managers of all time sitting on cloud code right now. It can build me whatever I want. All I need is have curiosity and a willingness to spend some time to do it, and I can get anything I want out of it. But I don't— that doesn't mean I'm gonna go replace my entire team, but it does mean if you're not getting it done, I will come up with an idea for how to go do that job. In getting, or get things off your plate. And I'll give you an example. I have a wonderful EA. She actually, I've gone through a lot of EAs 'cause I've had a lot of bad EAs, but I have a great one now. However, a lot of the work she does is work that is like basically copying and pasting and pulling data from a few different places to centralize it so I can get to it quickly and understand like what my meetings are every day. I told her a long time ago, I was like, I'm gonna probably automate this because it's something that I don't think you need to do. Like it's a low-quality use of your time. Um, so I did. Like, I have an AI build out all of that now, and it takes all my messages and information and moves it to the right place. Um, I told her also clearly, like, that doesn't mean I'm replacing her. It just means I'm gonna have her do higher leverage work. Now, with that said, I would argue she should have built that herself, right? The only thing I would say that she didn't do well, she should have said, Adam, you're so right. I'm— even if she didn't have that idea, I'm gonna go try to build this myself and build it for you. Because what would have happened now, she built this AI to go do the same work, her work, she would have owned that product. And now she's actually protecting herself because she's built this product that I don't know how it works, but I know it does work for her. So she, this is the creative disruptor. I think from like Only the Paranoid Survive or one of those key kind of business books where it's like, you need to, or disruption theory, right? You need to disrupt yourself before your competitor does. So in my EA's case, she should have disrupted her own work. I told her what the roadmap was going to be before I ever disrupted it for her. The moment I disrupted it for her, that's now off her plate and it's not going to come back because I've now built— I've disrupted her. And so what she needs to do, and this, I'm using this really as an analogy for all the employees who are listening, you need to disrupt yourself before I ever do it. Because once I do it, I'm I will realize I don't need to have you. And the people who disrupt themselves though will be the ones who stick around long-term because they now own a key product that I didn't build.

Yeah. And it's always going to be a seller's market for those type of people. It's the—

Yeah, but there aren't that many buyers anymore. There's fewer and fewer buyers and that's the problem that people will have.

Yeah. I think we're getting into a place where it is more like Hollywood. It's going to be like the bar's rising. And so what's likely gonna happen is if I were to like be in charge of hiring for my team at my current role, I would start going for like university grads that are like pliable and could take on this new methodology and just teach them to work this way and not have, they don't have any baggage where they're like, no, we have to have a bunch of meetings to make a small decision. It's go build it. Here's Cloud Code. Go build a demo. Show me a demo. What you think we could do? Yeah, might not be the right approach, but like at least we like learn something faster. There's no excuse. Like I do believe that the market's just going to reprice because this isn't the first time in humanity where there was a huge technological shift. It disrupted people, but then eventually like the market resettled and like repriced activities, and then the economy is built around that. Like I. It actually just reminded me of the, like, part of the title of that SpaceX article. It's called like Process is Expensive. And so the SpaceX insight is they found out that like the reason why like NASA's budget was like, they were just burning money is because it was mostly just like MBA overhead and like meetings and process. And

like, yeah, no, and that's the problem that happens with most companies is they build up all this process to essentially essentially to deal with human fallibility. They created a process. Okay, the Challenger shuttle exploded. Let's build all these processes now to make sure that doesn't happen again. That's well-meaning, and I understand why they would do that. However, instead of learning from it and improving, you now created this process that slows it all down. And so it's coming from a place of fear versus one of innovation. And now look, that's a really easy mindset to have, and it's difficult for every organization. I'm not sure my company is that much better. Right? We, we, an issue occurs, we build a process. We do try to do a retro and learn from it, but it's easy to put a new process in place. And this is where it's really hard to get out of those systems and say, I want to remove a process. Every new— I think one rule that Elon has for all of his companies is every new process we want to put in place, we have to remove at least one, if not two. And in fact, we keep removing until something breaks. So we're going to remove as many things as possible until we have so many things that break that We need to start add one more back in to fix it. And so subtract, subtract. And that's difficult for most organizations. That's hard. It's accepting a level of failure that you'd imagine no organization could be okay with, especially a rocket ship company. Literally, when something fails, your rocket explodes or someone might die. And yet it's like a multi— to take that risk.

Yeah, it's like a multimillion-dollar mistake. And, but it's like the idea of We are going to hit our head against this brick wall until it breaks. That attracts like those kind of like maniacs to solve those problems. I think, and especially like with process also involves like, what I'm learning is that like process is also pricing in like how hard a task was. So like it used to be like we'd have all these refinement meetings where I have to explain 2D Figma designs to engineers. To explain like the gaps, give 'em the director's commentary of like how everything fits together. Because yeah, I could make a prototype, but I have so much other work going on. It would be like the cost of making the prototype was more than just having all these meetings that were taking up my calendar to explain it. But now it's like you could just make a prototype. Now, like the price of doing a prototype is cheaper than all those meetings. Like the whole premise behind all these meetings is gone. I'd argue that premise behind doing a prototype versus that gives a point, a strong point of view, like a functional prototype doesn't even have to go into production, is challenging the premise of like the whole PRD memo culture.

Oh yeah, look, speaking of product stuff, very specifically, there's a way the product— I think we are at a world, right? I did traditional product at Twitter, all those other things. We're in a world where the product manager, first of all, the product manager needs to be acting like an engineer, but they have to be shipping new features on a daily basis, basically. They need to test them out that afternoon, and then they take those features and new changes and update them again for the next day. And it's essentially, it's a daily update cycle. And engineers need to be acting more like product managers and understanding what's the overall whole here that we're trying to build. And those roles are in a sense merging in many cases. And so that's the— Yeah. Um, question that arguably we should all be asking ourselves when we're building product is, How fast can we get new features and changes out the door? There's no waiting. There's no time anymore. You don't, you can't be slow because your competitors can eat your lunch and copy you in a day.

Yeah, there's no moat around software now. And so it's—

There's no moat around anything. I would actually argue there's almost no moat around anything anymore. You could argue hardware is harder, but like even that, there's no moat to some extent.

Yeah, it's all going down to brand power. You think about— I always like to look at the movie industry because it used to be like the golden age of film. It was just so expensive to get the equipment and the specialty, the specialization to make movies back in like the '60s and '70s where you could have it kind of as gatekeeping because you needed capital to make movies. And then eventually like the technology got better where effectively anyone can make a movie, but there's still like the top 100 Filmmakers. It just made the tail longer, but like the people that— there still is only like a top watermark. Correct. What's the difference between— so like, it, it means that the output was never the outcome in film. It was always about good script, good talent, well-run production. It really just comes down to, hey, does the story resonate and is it filling seats? And, and there's no moat around equipment or like technical— anybody could like make a high-quality movie with like very cheap software now. And it really is more about like the creative selection of choosing the right— it's more like humanities and stuff. And I'm getting to a point where I used to— there's all these courses on prompt engineering and like how to write good prompts. And I'm like, AI's better at making prompts. There's a skill creator in Claude for it that you could tell it, I want to automate this process. It creates the skill for you. It's like there's no technical skill. now that is going to save, is going to be defensible on your resume. You have to come up with— I'm challenging people to study, okay, let's do liberal arts again, humanities, learn what people like.

So what I think the defensible thing is though for individuals is now the ability to once again be creative, to get good at essentially I like to think a skillset I've had to hone over many years is being a manager of many people, is now being a manager of many agents. Yeah. In setting up, explaining clearly, I'm building all these things on a regular basis. Well, I explain really clear what I want, due dates, how to go do it, expectations outlined. It's literally the same as me explaining it to a human. And that's what you need to get good at. How do you get good at delegation overall? And you have to be creative though and question things and think, okay, what are the things that are missing here? What's this process that should be set up? And once you can have that conversation with AI, you can build anything. But those are once again the people that will still stick around because they're like, wait a second, maybe I could have AI go do this. And so that is the world we're moving into. And I'm hoping that a lot of people get on board with that. You mentioned you think we're going to get to this equilibrium again. I'm not so sure that's true. I hope it's true, but I'm not totally sure it is. And granted, look, I live in the red-pilled San Francisco world of— people seeing all this AI stuff regularly. So I'm surrounded by a lot of people in that sense who are thinking about this stuff. On the other hand, I haven't heard very many good explanations for what AI will be or do differently. Like, how, what are the jobs that are going to exist for us after this is all over?

Yeah, I think it's, and also, with all due respect to listeners from like the San Francisco area, gotten a lot of things wrong on like culture. Nice. Oh yeah, we have all these like technology, we have like, yeah, so like Apple's like a perfect example. It's like a lot, all the Steve Jobs like diatribes of you guys don't understand what people like want. And you could argue that him like investing in Jony, like finding this young design talent, Jony Ive, and giving him like the long leash to actually make computers desirable and look cool and like people like want the computers. It doesn't matter, it didn't matter how powerful the computer was, it's No, I want this really cool like MP3 device, computing device, because to them it was an accessory. It wasn't like a piece of computers. And they made computing like popular and helped computing go up the adoption curve. And then benefit, and that benefited like all the other companies as like people like trusted computers more, right? There's like the humanity side of it, but like most people are just saying, oh, because the technology can do this, Therefore, everyone's screwed. But then like normal people in Kansas are like, what? Like,

so totally, but yes, but like, this is once again, going back to my example of the factory in Connecticut, in kind of rural Connecticut shutting down and the whole town lost all their manufacturing jobs. I get that most of those people didn't know a lot about and probably don't even fully understand what it means to manufacture things in Asia for a lower cost and more effectively. However, what they should have done Instead of probably being protected by a union and fighting every job change, is saying instead, how do we embrace this? How do we actually say, okay, we are more expensive because it's more expensive to live in the US. Workers need to be better than the workers—

What's the creative solution?

What is the creative way to be better at all of these things? How do we use the inherent skills we have as Americans to be better than the alternative? And instead of fighting it, learn how to get better at those things. And that's where I think a lot of people don't realize that is, look, we live in this massively competitive marketplace, which is frankly created a better world for everyone overall. The world is a better place than it's ever been because of frankly all this competition. But competition means winners and losers. And if you are fighting progress, you will lose in the end. And that goes for unions fighting progress, employees not wanting to adopt new technology, whatever it is, you will lose. If you're unwilling to adopt the new thing and learn it and be good at it, there is no place in the world for me paying for someone who is— why would I as a company pay for someone who is slower at doing their work?

Yeah.

Gets worse outcome and gets worse outcomes. If I did that, my customers then would fire me at some point because they'd say your product's slower and worse than your competitor's product. Like, yeah, but like I'm supporting all these people who are wonderful people. Guess what? My customers don't care. They want outcomes. And that is the way the world works. And so if you want to keep your job, you need to learn how to be better, faster, embrace the new technology, get good at it. It's imperative for every company. It's imperative for every individual. And that is how you will succeed, have always succeeded arguably, but certainly will succeed in the world we're moving into.

Yeah, you're touching on another principle I talked about in another episode. where, you know, human history, it's like, what is like the most valuable commodity? Middle Ages, it was security. So if you had like an army and you could like bully people, you could be king, right? And then eventually it got to the point where the Industrial Revolution like depriced violence as a valuable skill and it's capital and it became capital. And so it was like the JP Morgans, they were the ruling class. And then eventually database. Like, information became the gold, and you have the oracles. And then eventually all those— you had— you still had to have capital to buy databases and benefit from that. And then all those databases got hooked up by the internet. And so like the cost of hardware, it was more about what do you do with the information now? And, and you got all the MBAs making decisions and doing analysis and like driving results that way. Now The price of that's gone down where it's like AI's pretty good at like pattern recognition and like coming up with a signal, right? So what's the new like high-priced commodity? Well, actually I wouldn't say it's high price. It's like the pr— actually for a long time, agency was this super expensive commodity. The price of agency's gone down. Mm-hmm. Like the, the, to exercise agency, there's no excuse to exercise agency, ask an agent to go explore something for you. And what are you going to do with it? So I'd like to hear like your recommend, like maybe your reaction to that. Like the price of agency has gone down. So now what are you going to do? Right.

What you're going to go do is figure out how to get a solution to something. There is no excuse to hand it off to someone else. There is no excuse to say, hey, I already did my own version of this and I checked it. Here's what I think is the right choice. Like we literally, so people are used to, you know, I'm going to go hand this off to my teammate. I'm gonna ask them to do the work. It's pass the ball around. Instead of saying, I wanna capture the flag, right? Maybe kickball versus capture the flag or something. You're trying to say, hey, okay, this problem showed up. I can go, I'm gonna do my first pass at figuring it out because I literally have a PhD on my computer that can figure this out for me. Right. And guess what? My manager's gonna do the same darn thing. So, I'm gonna try to figure this out myself the first time around and then say, here's my suggested outcome. And then go to your manager with the next thing. And this is what, this is literally the way that it has to work. You don't have a choice beyond having a level of agency in saying, I think I can go do this. To every question that comes up, I have, I can go figure out a solution myself first and foremost before I go ask for help. Because I have this massively powerful thing in my pocket. And it just, there's just no excuse anymore.

Yeah, it's like you go get a Maven course.

You don't even need a course. Maven's great, by the way. I know their team well. But you don't even need a course. You just, just go do it. If I have a question about something, right? If I have a question, you're using Spaces as an example. Okay, I've already trained an AI all about my company. It's trained on all of the documents that I've written. throughout the course of— Mm-hmm. All the public documents. We've all, we do this team-wide, we do a monthly performance or sort of an all-hands document where I write up a lot of information about where we are as a company. I have all of it in this. So if I want to go ask this AI bot, hey, pretend to be my world-class executive coach, what should I do with this decision? That is the first pass that I should do before I go pay someone $10,000 to be an actual coach for me. Or maybe they play different roles. Well,

and,

and that same thing.

And that improves, you could actually refine your selection criteria so you know which course to pick or which coach to hire because you're, you already, you got, you already get 80% there and you're just paying for the implementation at that point.

Right.

Yeah. I love the energy and the enthusiasm. I think it's, if I were to, a new wrinkle in my brain after talking to you today. Is this in my notebook right here? Is the you're not like the like taking a risk to put yourself out there because this also requires you like having a point of view and like risking rejection and getting like your hand slapped. Like maybe your boss does is insecure with this level of agency, which is like bad for that boss's career. But it's the fact that like. It used to be really expensive and risky to have a point of view. Like, I know before AI was good, like it would mean like not doing my core job to do some strategy work. And then if I'm wrong, I'm exposed. Like, but now it's, oh, I could have a point of view and get my job done. And so the, like the risk of exposure is so low. Okay. Worst case scenario, they're like, okay, thanks for the strategy recommendation. We're not going to do it. Okay, cool. Move on or do another iteration, take the feedback, do another iteration. And they're like, oh shit, like this is good. Like, like it's not risky anymore to just have a point of view.

Correct. In fact, I would argue it's not only not risky, it's imperative to have a point of view. You, there's no excuse not to have a perspective and point of view. If you are outsourcing, even if you're outsourcing that thinking to AI, you should still bring your unique version of it. to the table. And if you aren't bringing your unique perspective, then why don't I just have AI do it? What am I paying you as a human for?

Yeah, if you're just like filling out a template, then I'll just talk to AI using voice and it'll fill out the template.

Correct.

But like, it's like, get action, get feedback, don't wait to get feedback. That's the new wrinkle in my brain. Adam, I want to respect your time. Do you feel like there's anything that hasn't been said that should be said before we sign off?

No, just, I hope people take away from this is like, there are no excuses. This is, we are in a no-excuse world today. And if you want to be successful, you need to take action on your behalf, for yourself and for your company. And that is what's going to lead to long-term success, sustained success.

And how can people find your work?

Yeah, easy enough. I'm all over LinkedIn. So Adam Spector on LinkedIn. hirechore.com. So hirechore.com. So Hire Chore, because we do the chores. Find us, we will run the operations for you so you can get back to doing the things that you love. And frankly, we'll make your business successful.

Would you say that like, along like the threads that we talked about today, how you operate like your customer service at Shore is like that higher agency? You're not gonna just be like, here, fill out these forms every like Once a month, like these bad accounting firms. What does that experience look like? I'm actually very curious how it's different than another VA or—

Yeah, totally. We're not a VA, right? We're doing the higher level work. In many cases, we're literally running your op. We're literally taking care of your payroll situation. We're calling states on your behalf when there's a situation because the state says you owe them tons of money. We're talking with your team because they have questions about some benefits issue. You name it, we're literally doing all of that sort of work. And the goal that we try to get done is like we have a 5-minute SLA in response times. So like, how do you get this quickly and accurately in answer? How do you do this in a way like where it's— you need someone as an employer, you need a centralized, standardized place for all this information. So how do we create that location? That's what we do at Shore. And we are the one point of contact for all things back office, which should standardize the process and get you better outcomes.

And you don't ask to go call those other states like tax?

No, we proactively go do it. We, you know, they might send us a notice. Hey, you owe $10,000. Oh, cool. We try to tell our team, always tell our point of contact, let's say the CEO of the company, hey, by the way, we received this notice from the state saying you owe $10,000. Based on what we looked at, this doesn't look accurate. We're going to call the state and take care of it. Let us know if you disagree. Great. We're taking the action. The CEO can just thumbs up. Sounds good. Off my plate. I don't need to worry about it. Yeah, like I—

that's totally different than my experience with 1-800-Accountants. I'll just say the name. Like, yeah. Where it's like, oh, there's this new regulation, go figure it out. And then I have to go like use like AI to figure it out.

Yeah, it's terrible. That's not what you should get. You should have someone who's proactively handling this on your behalf and doing the thinking for you. To the whole point of this whole conversation, who's doing the thinking for you, comes back and says, hey, Caden, this is what we're going to go do. And you're just like, cool, sounds good. Thank you. Keep me posted.

Yeah. Awesome. And that's like, it's just saying like, Communicate intent and then go do it. And then because you communicate intent, they have an opportunity to provide notes on your plan. And usually they don't have notes because that's what they hired you for.

Right? Exactly

right. Yes. You're practicing what you preach. Love it. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me, Ken. I appreciate it.

Hey, listener, thanks again for listening to The Way of Product. As we power down today's session on the fusion of creativity and technology, Let's solidify the energy you've gotten from our dialogue today. If you've gleaned insights or strategies that could turbocharge your projects, I have a small but powerful ask. Swing by the platform where you're hearing this and leave a review. Think of it as your digital high five to us. It's a fuel that propels this content to more creative technologists like you, amplifying the impact of the shared knowledge. So until our next interview, keep pioneering and pushing the envelope. Thanks again for lending your ears and your imagination to our community. Catch you on the next download.